Now on Hulu: 'Obituary' Is How You Make a Great Unlikeable Female Character

Let’s make something quick: If you are a fan of Irish dark comedy-dramas, if you are a fan of stories set in small hellish Irish towns, or if you loved Bad Sisters, or if you’re Irish yourself and you’re just finding out about this series because RTÉ released it in a weird way: You don’t need me to sell you on this. Just go to Hulu, watch all six episodes between today and tomorrow, and then come back later. Those second clickthroughs will be much appreciated.

Now, for the rest of you, Obituary is one delightful, properly Gothic (ahem) and somewhat disturbing first season of TV, as in, I really hope we have more seasons of this gem.

Elvira Clancy (Siobhán Cullen) is a 24-year-old Irishwoman stuck in Kilraven, one of those charming but dying seaside towns. The kind of town that is dying so much that not even death provides much business. Her mother died at birth, and while her father (Michael Smiley) was dutiful and loving, he became an alcoholic as soon as she became an adult. Haunted by endogenous depression and a near-fatal stint with psychiatric medication, she makes do by writing obituaries at the local newspaper. As local newspapers do, her messy boss Hughie (David Ganly) is forced to make budget cuts, putting Elvira out of the payroll and in semi-freelance status: She’ll be paid 200 Euros per obituary, which means that at least 100 people would need to die per year for her to make the Irish minimum wage. Dying towns don’t die that quickly.

Elvira has a certain talent for writing, one that was never fully developed as she remained dragged down by the bog of her depression and, shortly afterward, taking care of her drunk father. But at the same time, she has a dark mind and a creeping sense of superiority and aloofness. A sense of entitlement and almost erotic fascination with death will lead her to a simple way of increasing her earnings, at least for her: Start killing people, targeting first those undeserving of living, and then write their obituaries. There is the added bonus of all you get to know about a person when they’re about to die.

It’s inevitable to compare Obituary to Dexter, both being shows about “good”, psychopath vigilantes who serve as our unreliable narrators. But the difference is that Dexter lives in Florida, a place that attracts the most depraved human monsters in the Americas. And that’s just in the Tallahassee Capitol. Meanwhile, Kilraven is just a small town, and as hellish as they can be, its devils are just petty: The bank lady who skims off money from welfare checks, the drunken guy who ran over a kid, the big-shot contractor who got workers killed because of negligence. They are terrible people but not monsters. Worse still, Elvira is rather crap at being a vigilante, a total amateur when it comes to making something look like an accident or a suicide. Ironically, she’s an excellent shot.

Obituary follows her progressive devolution from someone with sociopathic tendencies but who is still able to feel glimpses of regret and guilt, to someone who fully embraces her psychopathy, someone who went from being banally evil, killing people to make a buck, to someone who embraces the way killing makes her feel: Very good. In doing so, she starts putting the lives of his father at risk while compromising that of Mallory, her only friend and the local hot mess, played by Danielle Galligan (Shadow & Bone), one of the most naturally gifted actresses when portraying characters that are forces of nature. Complicating things further is the arrival of Emerson (Ronan Raftery), a big-city crime reporter and automatically the hottest guy in town, with whom Elvira clicks immediately and offers her an alternative to her destructive spiral. But Emerson has a hidden agenda, to solve the five-year-old murder of a German expat, the sole homicide haunting the town’s history.

Among the many asinine shouting matches about fiction on the internet, there’s the poorly informed notion that a character needs to be likable to be a “good” character. Or in more formal terms, a compelling, well-rounded character is one with which the audience can empathize and sympathize, which usually translates into a hero with flaws. That’s a terrible way to conceptualize a great character. This is the reasoning behind scores of protagonists, sold to us as heroic, when effectively they are despicable people. You are probably thinking of the same examples as I am. When it comes to female characters, this misguided notion is turned up to eleven, furthered by surface-level Hollywood notions of feminism and empowerment.

One of the consequences of this is an aversion to create a female character that is supposed to be unlikable. Lesser writers would’ve tried to make Elvira an anti-hero. They would’ve tried to make her victims thoroughly unlikable. They would’ve tried to make her fellow townsfolk into a gallery of folksy angels, threatened by a few Big Bads. Writer and creator Ray Lawlor doesn’t go for that. Elvira is fucking evil. But you feel for her. Elvira is on her way to become irredeemable, but she is compelling. And it’s Siobhán Cullen who brings everything together with two performances: Her narration, which is affected, full of childish glee and disturbing; contrasted with her walled-off and soft exterior performance, amplified by her ice queen physicality. Elvira is unforgettable, and indeed, she is scary both in the big moments as in the small ones. A brilliant character, thoroughly unlikable.

Perhaps the only problem is that Obituary relies too much on her while trudging along in the interconnected subplots (some of which have pretty obvious results). But as a first season, it works as a very good set-up for an even darker follow-up.

All episodes of Obituary are now available on Hulu.

Alberto Cox is not beating the allegations about his thing for Irish actresses.